Light filled the cabin: a storm of it, multicolored cubes and spheres which swarmed around him, dazzling him. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the cubes hurtled together and coalesced.

There was a man sitting beside Arrow Maker, inside the pod, dressed in a gray silver tunic and trousers. His hands were in his lap, folded calmly, and through his belly and thighs Arrow Maker could see the quiver of arrows he’d left on the chair — he could actually see the quiver, through the flesh of the man.

The man smiled. “My name’s Mark — Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Don’t be frightened.”

Arrow Maker screamed.

Lieserl swam with the photino birds through the heart of the bloated Sun. The photino birds appeared to relish Sol’s new incarnation. Plasma oscillations caused energy to flood out of the core, in neutrino-antineutrino pairs, and the birds swooped around the core, drinking in this glow of new radiance.

The matter in the inert, collapsing core had become so compressed it was degenerate, its density so high that the intermolecular forces that governed its behavior as a gas had broken down. Now, the gravitational infall was balanced by the pressure of electrons themselves: the mysterious rule of quantum mechanics called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which ensures that no two electrons can share the same energy level.

But this new state of equilibrium couldn’t last for long, Lieserl realized. The shell of fusing hydrogen around the core continued to burn its way outward, raining helium ash down on the core; and so the core continued to grow, to heat up.

Now that the inner planets were gone, she felt utterly isolated.

Why, even the stone-faced bureaucrats of the Assimilation period had been contact of a sort. She’d found it immensely valuable to be able to share impressions with somebody else — somebody outside her own sensorium. In fact she wondered if it were possible for any human being to remain sane, given a long enough period without communication.

But then again, she thought wryly, she wasn’t a human being…

Into Lethe with that. She closed her eyes and stretched. She took a slow, careful inventory of her Virtual body-image. She wriggled her fingers, relishing the detailed feel of sliding tendons and stretching skin; she arched her back and felt the muscles at the front of her thighs pull taut; she worked her feet forward and back, as if she were training for some celestial ballet, and focused on the slow, smooth working of her ankles and toes.

She was human, all right, and she was determined to stay that way — even despite the way she’d been treated by humans themselves, in her brief, but still vivid, corporeal life. What had she been but a freak, an experiment that had ultimately been abandoned?

She didn’t owe people anything, she told herself.

Maybe.

But again that buried urge to communicate all this gripped her: she felt she had to tell someone about all this, to warn them.

But those feelings weren’t logical, she knew. Since the wormhole telemetry link had been shut down she had no way to communicate anyway. And while she had dreamed, here inside the imperilled heart of the Sun, five million years had worn away in the Solar System outside. For all she knew there might be no humans left alive, anywhere, to hear whatever she might have to say.

…Still, she itched to talk.

Again, maser radiation shone out of a convection cell and sparkled over her, bright and coherent.

Intrigued, she followed the path of one of the convection cells as it swept out of the heart of the Sun, bearing its freight of heat energy; she tried to trace the source of the maser light.

The radiation, she found, was coming from a thin trace of silicon monoxide in the mantle gas. Collisions between particles were pumping the gas with energy, she saw — leaving the monoxide molecules in an unstable, excited state, rotating rapidly.

A photon of just the right frequency, impacting a pumped molecule, could cause the molecule to tip out of its unstable state. The molecule shed energy and emitted another photon of the same frequency. So the result was two photons, where one had been before… And the two photons stimulated two more atoms, resulting in four photons… A chain reaction followed, growing geometrically, with a flood of photons from the stimulated silicon monoxide molecules — all at the same microwave frequency, and all coherent — with the same phase.

Lieserl knew that to get significant maser effects, pumped molecules had to be arranged in a line of sight, to get a long path of coherence. The convection cells, with their huge, multimillion-mile journeys to the surface and back, provided just such pathways. Maser radiation cascaded up and down the long flanks of the cells, spearing into and out of the helium core.

The maser radiation could even escape from the Sun altogether, she saw. The convection founts grazed the surface, at their most extreme points; maser energy was blasted out, tangential to the surface of the swollen Sun, forming tiny, precise beacons of coherent light.

And the maser beacons were, she realized with a growing excitement, very, very distinctive.

Excited, she swept back and forth through the huge convection cells. It wasn’t difficult, she found, to disrupt the form of the coherent silicon monoxide maser beams; she imposed structure on the beams’ polarization, phasing and coherent lengths.

She started with simple signals: sequences of prime numbers, straightforward binary arrays of symbols. She could keep that up almost indefinitely; thanks to the time it took for the coherent radiation to reach their firing points at the surface, it was sufficient for her to return to the convection cells every few days to re-initiate her sequence of signals. She could trace echoes of her signals, in fact, persisting even in the downfalling sides of the cells.

Then, as her confidence grew, she began to impose meaningful information content on her simple signal structure. With binary representations of images in two and three dimensions, and with data provided in every human language she knew, she began to relate the story of what had happened to her, here in the heart of the Sun — and of what the photino birds were doing to mankind’s star.

Feverishly she worked at the maser signals, while the final death of the Sun unraveled.

In the stern galley of the Great Britain, Louise sat before her data desks. The little pod from the lifedome showed up as a block of pixels sliding past a schematic of the Northern.

Over the radio link she heard screams.

“Oh, for Lethe’s sake, Mark, don’t scare him completely out of his mind.”

Mark sounded hurt. “I’m doing my best.”

Louise felt too tired, too used up, to cope with this sudden flood of events.

She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old. It might have been different if Mark had survived, of course: his AS system had imploded after four centuries, not long after he and Louise had moved out of the lifedome and into the Britain. Maybe if Mark had lived, if she’d spent all these years with another person — not alone — she wouldn’t have ended up feeling so damn stale.

She comforted herself with the thought that, whatever was going on today, the Northern’s immense journey was nearing its end, now. Another few decades, when she had shepherded the wormhole Interface and motley inhabitants of the lifedome — those who’d survived among those battling, swarming masses — through all these dreadful years, she would be able to let go at last. Maybe she would implode then, she thought, like some dried-up husk.